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The Reading Practices of Preservice Teachers:

On Becoming Critical Consumers

Timothy J, Murnen, Bowling Green State University

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to
catalogue and analyze the reading practices of a group of 36 language arts
methods students. The study found that although these preservice language arts
teachers considered themselves readers, they engaged in very little
self-initiated leisure reading, they spent significantly more time watching
movies than reading, they implemented very few of the reading strategies they
learned in their content reading course, and they were relatively unaware of the
reading strategies they do use. Implications for teacher education are
discussed.

Developing a Context
for the Study

Preservice language arts teachers use a variety of
reading strategies in their daily reading practices, but are often unaware of
how these strategies function, or how to teach their students to develop their
own reading strategies. Current research in preservice teachers’ attitudes,
practices, and beliefs reveal that many of them either struggle with their own
reading practices, or do not value the reading strategies they are taught in
content reading courses during their university studies (Dynak, 1996; Bean,
2001; Wolf, 2001; Barry, 2002; Griffin, 2003; Lesley, 2004). As a result, they
don’t put those practices and strategies into effect in their teaching. In
addition, researchers have found that unless preservice teachers experience
effective teacher education programs that challenge them to reflect and reshape
their teaching beliefs, they will revert to teaching their students using
literacy practices, strategies, and learning styles they already know (Haar,
Hall, Schoepp, & Smith, 2002; Sloan, Daane, & Giesen, 2004; Hoffman et
al., 2005).

In my language arts methods
courses, I had seen just enough of this disconnect—students’ lack of awareness
of the strategies they invoked as they read, and their inability or reluctance
to use content reading strategies in their actual classroom teaching—that I
wanted to research it more fully in order to provide my students opportunities
to be effective reading and language arts teachers in their student teaching
placements, and on into their teaching careers. Initially, I wanted to find out
more about my students’ reading and writing practices, and how they actually
might use these practices in their teaching. I also wanted to know more about
the strategies they learned in their content reading course, and how they might
put them to use in their teaching. In order to shape my own study, I turned to a
couple of other studies of preservice and new teachers. Gupta (2004) for
instance, borrowed Manna & Misheff’s (1987) categories of Transactional
Readers and Reduced Readers to characterize students in a teacher
training institute in Singapore. Transactional Readers “interact with the text
to create meaning and enjoy reading” (p. 69). Reduced Readers “perceive reading
as painful and are reluctant readers” (p. 69). Gupta found that out of 29
participants in the study, only three characterized themselves as Transactional
Readers, while 26 characterized themselves as Reduced Readers (Gupta, 2004).

In another study—of former intern
teachers in their first five years of teaching—Barry (2002) found that although
many former intern teachers valued the reading strategies they were exposed to
in content reading courses, several found that they had little time or
motivation to implement such strategies in their content area classrooms. One
chemistry teacher noted, “With 110 kids, I only do [writing] when I have lots of
time” (p. 140). In addition, Barry cited a second-year biology teacher who
“loved the theory behind” concept maps, but found that “Kids hate them. I
find them difficult to assess” (p. 140). In addition, Bean’s (2001) study also
looked at how preservice teachers implemented content reading strategies in
their field placement sites. His findings suggest that preservice teachers often
put aside the strategies they learned in content reading as a result of the
influence of their cooperating teacher. They lack the ability to adapt content
reading strategies to the dynamic sociocultural context of the field site
classroom.

Before proceeding further,
however, the terms literacy practices, reading practices, and reading
strategies need to be clarified, lest it seem that they are interchangeable.
They do not mean the same thing. Literacy practices are the reading, writing,
speaking, listening, presenting, and thinking practices that members engage in
as a function of being in a particular group or setting. Reading practices are
one subset of literacy practices. They are all the different ways that one might
engage in reading. For instance, reading alone is one particular reading
practice. Further still, reading fiction alone is a different reading practice
than reading a textbook alone; they engage different thought processes,
different purposes. etc. Reading within a reading circle or book club is another
reading practice. Reading aloud to children is yet another reading practice.
There are dozens of other examples of reading practices, but these should
suffice to illustrate the point.

Within each of these reading
practices, there are particular reading strategies that one employs in order to
engage in particular reading practice. A strategy, to borrow Barry (2002)
borrowing from Harris & Hodges (1995), is “a systematic plan, consciously
adapted and monitored to improve one’s performance in learning” (p. 132). For
instance, when one reads aloud to a child, there are any number of strategies at
one’s disposal to make the reading event meaningful. Reading out loud with vocal
inflection is one strategy; by doing so, the reader helps to bring particular
characters, emotions, and situations to life for the child. The child in that
setting engages in particular reading strategies too, that include a great deal
of active listening, and perhaps vocal participation as well. However, when one
reads alone, rarely is a read-aloud strategy invoked. In this setting, the
reader engages other strategies. Furthermore, in a book club setting, readers
invoke other strategies, such as oral reading, discussion, journaling, thinking
out loud, and choral reading. In a literature circle format—a particular type of
book club—participants engage the reading of a text using role-specific
strategies such as question master, passage picker, word wizard, or connector.
These examples illustrate the difference between practices and strategies, and
hint at the range of strategies available to readers within various literacy
practices.

The Study

Among my other roles in our
reading program, I teach an integrated language arts methods course to secondary
English majors, in the semester before they do their student teaching. During
the semester that I enacted this study, I taught two sections of this course,
with a total population of 39 students: 20 in one class, and 19 in another
class. Of these 39, 36 chose to participate in the study. It is important to
note that during this semester, students not only take their final set of
university classes—including content reading and this language arts methods
course—but they engage in a 4-week field-based practicum as well. This means
that they design units and lessons in this language arts course, and then teach
those lessons to students in real classrooms. This provides students the
opportunity (in theory) to make connections from their course work to their
field work, and it provides the teacher-researcher the opportunity to see how
well students actually make these connections. The purpose of this study was to
explore just how students engaged reading practices and strategies and
implemented them in their own teaching practices.

Like Gupta, I was interested in
how my students perceived themselves as readers. I wondered whether most of them
would label themselves as reduced readers, or transactional readers? And like
Barry and Bean, I was interested in the relationship between reading strategies
learned in content reading, and the practices they actually implemented in their
field sites and first year teaching. Building from these studies, I developed a
cluster of driving questions which I hoped to address in some form: a) Do my
secondary language arts majors consider themselves readers?, b) What are their
reading and writing practices, and what patterns emerge from a systematic study
of their literacy backgrounds?, c) When they read, what strategies do they
employ, and what connection do these preservice teachers make between their own
reading and the reading practices they will engage in with their students?, d)
Do preservice teachers actually use the reading strategies they learn in content
reading?, and e) If not, why not? What can be done in the language arts methods
course to make those connections?

Grounded in these questions, and
the studies of Gupta, Barry, and Bean, I developed a three-step approach to data
collection. First, I developed a survey designed to gather information about my
students’ current reading and writing practices, and their literacy
upbringing—the Literacy Self-Assessment (see Figure 1). Second, I developed a
graphic organizer—the Reading Strategies Self-Assessment—which asked students to
articulate the types of reading they engaged in, and the strategies they
employed in these contexts (see Figure 2). Third, I analyzed the language arts
units students created for my course, and which they would be teaching out in
their field site, in order to assess their use of content reading strategies in
their actual teaching.

The Literacy-Self Assessment

My desire to survey my students’
literacy practices was not purely for research purposes; I also wanted to model
for them a survey strategy that they might use to gather background information
about the literacy practices of their own students. Using a simple model
outlined in one of the textbooks we were using for the course (Strickland &
Strickland, 2002, p. 37, 39), I developed my Literacy Self-Assessment and asked
students to complete it in as great a detail as they could. While the
Stricklands’ survey was only ten questions long—a good model for my preservice
teachers to use with their students—I was interested in obtaining greater
details about my students’ literacy practices. My survey consisted of 25
questions about students’ current literacy practices—reading, writing, viewing,
etc.—and the literacy environment in which they grew up. The survey was
distributed in paper form, but also in electronic form as an attachment to
email, in order to enable students to type right on their form in greater detail
than provided on paper. This survey was deliberately designed as an open-ended
questionnaire to provide students the opportunity to offer details about their
literacy experiences, rather than to elicit only a number on a likert scale. It
was, however, possible to code the data (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) in such a
way so as to convert student responses to number codes that would provide
similarly quantitative data.

The Reading Strategies Self-Assessment

In order to understand how
preservice teachers engage reading strategies in the units that they design and
implement during their methods field experience, I first needed to establish a
baseline regarding their own use of reading strategies. With this in mind, I
developed the Reading Strategies Self Assessment, which asked students to
articulate the strategies they use when they read (see Figure 2). The top half
of the tool asked students to simply write about the strategies they use; it
functioned as a free-write journal. The bottom half of the tool was divided into
two columns—leisure reading and academic reading. After free-writing about their
own reading strategies, students were to categorize those strategies into at
least these two domains. This dichotomy was borrowed from Gupta’s study, but it
seemed to fit my project as well.

Integrated Language Arts Units

Students in my methods course are
not English majors, but Integrated Language Arts majors. This may be semantic
two-step to some, but for us it was a significant distinction. While these
students took a great number of courses in the English department, they also
studied journalism, theatre and film, media and communications, and pop culture
and folklore. Furthermore, in my class, we prepared ourselves to teach the six
language arts—reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and visually
representing—in an integrated structure. The culminating project for the course
was to design an integrated language arts unit. This meant that it could not
simply be a unit on “The Noun,” or “Grammar,” or even a unit focused solely on a
single novel. It needed to integrate these six language arts. It needed to
provide their students opportunities to read, write, listen, speak, view, and
visually represent. Within this constraint, my methods students were relatively
free to operate. For instance, I did not demand that they specifically
incorporate reading strategies from their content reading course; however, by
the end of the semester, after having begun to see patterns in their literacy
practices, I was very interested in the extent to which they actually did make
connections from content reading to the units they were designing in my course
and implementing with students in their field sites.

Findings

While there were 25 questions to
the survey, the findings could be synthesized into a few categories.
Furthermore, not all of the findings could be gathered from the survey alone,
but also from the Reading Strategies Self Assessment, as well as an analysis of
the units that the methods students produced. The analysis revealed insights
into preservice teachers’ beliefs about themselves as readers, their reading
practices, their reading strategies, their movie viewing practices, their use of
writing practices and strategies, and the extent to which they incorporated any
specific reading strategies learned in their content reading course.

Students as Readers

Students almost unanimously saw
themselves as readers; however the reading in which they engaged was almost
exclusively academic reading. When asked: Do you consider yourself a
reader? in question #7 of the Literacy Self-Assessment, nearly all of the
students did consider themselves readers, as opposed to Gupta’s study, where
most students considered themselves reduced readers. Of the 36 participants in
the study, 33 students (92%) considered themselves a strong or very strong
reader. Two students (6%) considered themselves average readers. One student
(2%) considered himself a below average reader. These students read on average
10-15 hours a week. Most of this reading was for school. This school reading
fell into two categories: 1) academic reading, such as textbooks and articles,
and 2) quasi-leisure reading, characterized by novels they had to read for
school.

Quasi-leisure Reading

In order to explore the reading
strategies students employed, I created the Reading Strategy Self Assessment,
which broke reading practices into a simple dichotomy: academic reading vs.
leisure reading. It was a dichotomy borrowed from Gupta’s study, but it seemed
to fit my project when I began. However, this simple dichotomy fell apart as the
study proceeded. Despite considering themselves readers, students engaged in
very little self-initiated leisure reading; when asked to discuss and
characterize their leisure reading, 29 students (81%) described only leisure
reading that was initiated by their university coursework. As a result, I
generated a new category—quasi-leisure reading—to describe their situation. In
general, these students considered themselves readers mainly because they had so
much required reading for school. However, outside of school, other activities
competed for their leisure time.

Reading Alone or with Others

For the most part, these students
do not read in groups; they prefer to read alone. Of the 36 participants, 33
(92%) preferred to read on their own. Two participants (6%) were comfortable
reading either alone or with others. Only one (2%) said that she preferred to
read with her best friend. This is interesting, in light of the fact that
cooperative reading group settings such as literacy circles have worked their
way into the mainstream of constructivist and social constructivist pedagogy.
For preservice teachers who will soon be expected to teach their students to
read in groups, they do very little of it themselves.

Books and Movies

While these students characterize
themselves as readers, their responses about movies offer a complex and
contrasting picture. When asked: Would you rather read a book or watch a
movie?, ten students (28%) preferred movies, 16 (44%) preferred books, and
ten (28%) said that it depended on circumstances, such as their mood. While this
might suggest that students lean toward preferring books over movies, other
statistics reveal something else. While students read on the average 2-3 novels
every 10 weeks, they watched 2-3 movies every week. One student responded that
she watched one movie per day in her home, and three every month at the movie
theatre.

Growing Up with Reading & Writing

In the childhood homes of these
preservice teachers, when reading did take place, it was confined for the most
part to newspapers or magazines. In 33 of these homes (92%), the family received
the newspaper daily, although it was not necessarily read on a daily basis. In
15 of these homes (42%), the family received regular magazine subscriptions. In
3 of these homes (8%), the Bible was read regularly. In 8 of these homes (22%),
fiction was read by at least one parent on a regular basis. Beyond these
examples, very little other reading was reported, with a few exceptions. One
student reported that her father was “always reading”—biographies, novels, the
New York Times. Another student reported that she remembered her father
reading and writing a great deal during the time he was in college. One other
student reported that her dad and sister “read different books all of the time.”
Finally, one other student reported that the family read Time magazine,
Newsweek, National Geographic, and “all kinds of literature.”
Furthermore, in these same 36 homes, students reported that even less writing
occurred than reading, and consisted of little more than grocery lists, cards,
and letters.

Students as Writers

Students explained that they spent on average 4 hours per week writing; however,
time spent writing ranged from 1 hour per week, to 12 hours per week. Most of
this writing was academic in nature—papers and projects for classes. After
papers, journals and emails constituted most of their other writing. It was
unclear how many of the journal responses were personal, or represented required
writing for courses; however, it can be assumed that some of these journalings
were in response to academic assignments, since journals were part of the course
requirements for my class. All writing was not academic, however. Of the 36
students in the study, 11 students (31%) articulated that they wrote some type
of creative writing. Poetry was listed six times. Other types of creative
writing included screenplays, songs, and short stories. In addition, when asked,
What were the last three things you have written?, one student responded
“homework, emails, and wedding vows.”

The Writing Process

How students engaged the writing process was interesting as well. Of the 36
students in the study, 15 (42%) responded that they wrote only one draft, and
then edited that draft. Of the 36 students, 14 (39%) clearly articulated that
they engaged the writing process by writing multiple drafts of essays. Seven
students gave various responses, ranging from “it depends” to “whatever is
necessary.” Again, this is compelling in light of the fact that these preservice
teachers will soon be expected to teach writing to their students within a
writing process approach.

Reading Strategies

When students were asked to list the reading strategies they actually use when
they engage in reading practices, few could articulate clear strategies. Most of
the responses fell into categories such as: “take notes,” “write a brief
summary,” “skim,” “write down interesting thoughts,” “underline,” “highlight,”
“re-read,” and “read aloud.” Beyond these types of responses, none of the
students invoked specific reading strategies studied in their content reading
course. Furthermore, in the units they created for my language arts methods
class, very few preservice teachers included reading strategies taught in their
content reading course. The most common, and they were each used only twice,
were: 1) the Anticipation Guide, and 2) a RAFT activity. The one large exception
was that several students incorporated Literature Circles in their unit plans.
However, this was one strategy that we explored in great detail in my class, so
it cannot serve as clear evidence that students brought content reading
strategies into the units they created and taught.

Summary of Findings

The study found that although
these preservice language arts teachers considered themselves readers, they
engaged in very little self-initiated leisure reading, they spent significantly
more time watching movies than reading, they implemented very few of the reading
strategies they learned in their content reading course, and they were
relatively unaware of the reading strategies they do use. All of these findings
pose significant implications for the teaching of language arts methods.

Conclusions &
Implications

Similar to the findings of many of
the studies I read, there is a significant disconnect between the reading
strategies these preservice teachers value in theory, and the reading strategies
they put into practice in their own reading or in the reading they assign in
their classrooms. In response to this disconnect, many researchers (Moje, Young,
Readance, and Moore, 2000; Bean, 2001; Lesley, 2004) argue that content reading
methods courses need to present these reading strategies in greater context. As
the language arts methods instructor, however, I recognize the valuable role
that my course—and other content methods courses—can play in addressing this
disconnect. My course can and should be a conduit—a connector—between the often
decontextualized strategies learned in content methods, and the real world
contexts of the field site classroom. As the language arts methods instructor, I
have the opportunity to engage students to consider the reading practices they
already enact, and to make meaningful use of the strategies they learn in
content reading. If it doesn’t happen in my methods course, then when will
preservice teachers learn to really engage the principals and practices learned
in their content literacy course? However, because these language arts majors
have difficulty seeing the connections between content reading and language
arts, I am deeply concerned that intern teachers in other content areas will
have an exponentially more difficult time drawing these connections. If I can’t
figure out how to help my preservice teachers incorporate literacy practices
into their language arts units, how can we expect a science or math teacher to
do the same?

Having said this, however, finding
ways to engage content reading strategies meaningfully within the larger goals
of the language arts methods course is not as simple as finding places for
methods students to insert content reading strategies into their lesson plans.
My secondary language arts methods students clearly struggle with the task of
turning their reading strategies, or their lack of awareness of their reading
strategies, into useful practices for their own students. Moje, Young, Readance,
and Moore (2000) argue that effective literacy instruction happens when teachers
become critical consumers. “Critical consumers situate recommendations,
determining where they are coming from and where they would like us to go.
Critical consumers continually question claims, analyzing, comparing, and
evaluating what is said” (p. 403). Developing the use of content reading
strategies in the language arts methods course is not simply about finding
insertion points for reading strategies. It begins by making preservice teachers
more critically aware of the role these reading strategies play in the overall
task of educating students, and by giving them opportunities to confront their
own reading practices as they begin to shape the reading practices of their own
classrooms.

In response to the challenge of making my students critical consumers of
literacy practices, I have begun to reshape my language arts methods course to
give preservice students opportunities to confront their own reading practices
and to engage content reading strategies in their teaching and planning. First,
I have begun to find places where students can meaningfully incorporate content
reading strategies into their language arts work. Midway through the semester
students must bring in one lesson from the unit they are developing, and teach
that lesson in a micro-teaching setting. Within this lesson, students must
incorporate one reading or literacy strategy they have learned in their content
reading course.

In addition to such small
insertion strategies, however, I have been developing ways for these preservice
teachers to be critical consumers—to think about literacy practices, and the
literacy expectations we place on students out in schools—in more critical ways.
First, we enact a Literacy Culture Project, in which preservice teachers study
the literacy culture of the school they have been assigned for methods and
student teaching. They gather general demographic data about the school and
community, and specific data about the literacy culture of the school—its test
scores in reading and writing, and attitudes and practices surrounding reading,
writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and visually representing. My preservice
students also interview at least one student in their new school to find out
more about this student’s literacy background and practices. With all of this
data gathered, they create a powerpoint presentation and write a short paper
addressing how they will teach literacy within this school literacy culture.

In addition to this project, we
have incorporated “new” texts into the course: Jim Burke’s (2003) The English
Teacher’s Companion and Patrick Finn’s (1999) Literacy with an
Attitude. Using these two texts, we confront the critical literacy issues at
stake for students. We lay our own literacy practices and upbringings on the
table, and compare/contrast them to the students we encounter in our schools. In
this way, preservice teachers engage literacy beyond just playing with
decontextualized, one-size-fits-all reading strategies. Instead of simply
figuring out ways to insert content reading strategies into their units, they
are reconceptualizing their units to address the literacy needs of their
particular student populations.

Beyond my class however, the real
challenge lies in encouraging other content methods instructors to re-envision
their courses to address the critical literacy issues at stake for their
preservice teachers. If language arts methods students have difficulty engaging
content literacy principles and practices, one can only wonder what challenges
face math, science, and social studies preservice teachers.

Directions: The Stricklands (2002) text suggested that
teachers develop and implement some kind of literacy survey, of no more than 10
questions, designed to allow you some insight into the literacy background,
beliefs, and practices of your students. I thought we might try that here,
although I have created a slightly expanded list of 25 questions. I am sending
this electronically. I want you to respond to each question in as much detail as
you care to. This will help me understand more about your literacy backgrounds,
and it gives us some things to work on and develop throughout the semester.
Bring a copy to class, but send an electronic copy back to me as well.

How much time do you spend reading each week?

What kinds of things do you like to read?

What were the last three things you have read? Why did you
read each one?

Do you read on your own, or in conjunction with others,
such as in a reading discussion group?

Would you rather read a book or watch a movie?

When you read a book, do you ever discuss it afterwards
with friends? When you watch a movie, do you ever discuss it afterwards with
friends? Describe to some extent the kinds of things you discuss.

Do you consider yourself a “reader”? How would you define
that?

What’s the best book you ever read or one of your
favorites? When did you read it and why was it memorable?

What would you consider a “good” book?

Do you ever go to libraries or bookstores? How often? For
what purpose?

Is reading important in your life? Explain a bit.

How much time do you spend writing each week?

What kinds of things do you tend to write?

What were the last three things you have written?

When you write, do you write multiple drafts? Do others
read your drafts and offer you feedback? In other words, to what extent do you
actually engage in the writing process?

How often do you go out to the movies?

How often do you watch movies at home or at someone’s
home?

Growing up, to what extent did you read on your own
outside of school?

Would you consider yourself a strong reader in elementary
school? High school?

Do you consider yourself a strong reader now? Explain.

Growing up, to what extent did you write on your own
outside of school?

Would you consider yourself a strong writer in elementary
school? High school?

Do you consider yourself a strong writer now? Explain.

What kind of reading took place in your home growing up?
Did your family have daily newspaper delivery, or weekly news magazines? Who
read those texts? How often?

What kind of writing took place in your home growing up?
Who did this writing? To what extent was it done willing, and to what extent
was it done as a necessity, or a requirement?

Figure 2

Reading Strategies Self Assessment

Directions:

When you read, what do you do? In particular, what strategies
do you use? Do you use different strategies for leisure reading than for
academic reading? When the reading gets difficult, what do you do? Write about
this in as much detail as possible in the lined space below. During our
discussion, we’ll extract the key points into these two columns.